Really Recording a Lecture

Yesterday I had two students write in saying they would miss class for the flu, and one for an emergency root canal. It seemed a good opportunity to see if I could “record” class for them, especially since I’m now using Prezi.

I have recorded audio before, on my little Phillips mp3 player. I have even sychronized it with my PowerPoints, and posted it on Slideshare for almost a whole class last year.

But I never liked PowerPoint, and I’ve begun experimenting with Prezi. So I tried ScreenToaster, which doesn’t require a download to my classroom computer. I started up ScreenToaster, created a box that covered my Prezi, and started recording. Then I started audio recording on my mp3 player. I lectured for about an hour. Having never used ScreenToaster before, I saved as .mov before I left the room, but didn’t save at the site itself because I assumed ScreenToaster saved it (it doesn’t). That was OK — I had a .mov for the video on my flash drive (which had the Prezi on it already), and a .mp3 for audio on my Phillips.

I put them together in Quicktime Pro by opening the audio, opening the video, lining it up as best I could and pasting. Then I created a movie of the same size with a graphic and some music, and pasted it on. This was not elegant, but better than using iMovie, which would have messed up the stills.

The resulting .mov was big, so I tried to upload it to Vimeo, but the multiple file types included meant Vimeo wouldn’t take it. After exporting several times (very frustrating with such a big file), I had an “aha!” moment and just converted it using VisualHub to an mp4 .mov . This uploaded into Vimeo.